Fig. 5: Breakdown of environmental impacts of lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling using different input electricity sources.
From: Life cycle comparison of industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling and mining supply chains
a Contributions to the environmental impacts of recycling processes using electricity from the Nevada Power Company, including energy consumption, CO2-eq emission, and water consumption by different input consumables used in circular processes for LIB feedstocks from production scrap (recycled scrap) and used end-of-life energized batteries (recycled battery) used by Redwood Materials. b Environmental impacts of input electricity sources on CO2-eq emissions and water consumption in the LIB recycling operations employed by Redwood Materials methods for production scrap and energized batteries. CO2-eq emissions and water consumption were based on the resources consumed by electricity generated from several electricity sources: Nevada Renewable Energy Tariff (NV*), Bonneville Power Administration (BPAT), California Independent System Operator (CISO), Nevada Power Company (NEVP), and Western Area Power Administration: Colorado-Missouri (WACM). The red dashed lines denote the environmental impacts of the analogous conventional refining process. Note that influences of energy sources on environmental impacts are only presented for the circular supply chains, but not for conventional supply chains. Specific environmental impacts presented in the figures are detailed in Supplementary Table 12. c Tradeoff relationship between embodied water consumption and CO2-eq emission by different power sources, including electricity grids in different locations (circles), purely power sources (squares), and Nevada Renewable Energy Tariff (NV*, triangles). The red dashed line denotes the lower bound of the water-CO2 performance, i.e., the existing electricity grids that have the lowest water consumption and CO2-eq emission simultaneously.
